Recovery week

After the epicness (at least for me) of last week I had to rest a bit and take it easy. It took me three days to recover from the marathon. I think the pain in the legs I felt on Sunday was mostly due to the mud. I really had to use muscles I rarely use. So Monday I rested. I had a couple of celebratory beers in the evening:

Tuesday I had planned to go for an easy run but still felt very stiff, so I stayed in bed. Wednesday I finally went for a run and it felt so good. Three days with no running is now too much for me. I did 10 easy km at 4:25 min/km. It was quite warm, surprisingly so.

Thursday, as an experiment, I did the exact same route as the day before but did the final 5km at a 4 min/km or faster pace with a cool down km at the end. I struggled a bit. Too warm for what I was wearing and I still had tired legs.

Then Friday I decided I recovered enough and it was time to up the game so I went for a 15k run. More than the usual week-day 10k. Nothing really special, but I felt the legs were almost back to normal.

Saturday I felt good enough to go for a long run, grabbed my trusty handheld bottle, one gel (I should have taken 2) and went out in the freezing cold. It was between -2 and 0 all the time. It went really well: Bushy Park, Hampton Court to Kingston, Richmond Park and then into Wimbledon Common. I know so little of Wimbledon Common and it is so wild in places that I got lost running in the woods and mud. By the time I was out and back to Richmond Park I was already at around 20k so I decided to head home the way I came, instead of all the way around the park. I got home after exactly 30k. I was starving, but very happy. I was not expecting to be able to run so much a week after the marathon. Beautiful run, started on icy trails, caught some snow, rain and finished in the sunshine.

So all in all a good easy week, ran a total of 65k and, I think, recovered well. Next week I will resume The Cool Impossible training plan. I managed to get the heart rate monitor working again, by buying a new one. 🙂